Urban Development

Introduction

Nearly 4.4 billion people, or about 55% of the world's population, lived in cities in 2018. By 2045, this number is anticipated to grow to 6 billion.¹ Such level of growth requires innovative and targeted urban solutions. By more effectively leveraging open data, cities can meet the needs of an ever-growing population in an effective and sustainable manner. This paper updates the previous contribution by Jean-Noé Landry, titled “Open Data and Urban Development” in the 2019 edition of The State of Open Data.² It also aims to contribute to a further deepening of the Third Wave of Open Data, which highlights the significance of open data at the subnational level as a more direct and immediate response to the on-the-ground needs of citizens.³ It considers recent developments in how the use of, and approach to, open data has evolved within an urban development context. It seeks to discuss emerging applications of open data in cities, recent developments in open data infrastructure, governance and policies related to open data, and the future outlook of the role of open data in urbanization. 

The Emergent Uses of Open Data Within Cities

This section covers key emerging topics and highlights sectors where open data has been applied to bring about lasting positive impact in urban environments. For each topic or sector, we will explore a number of examples, drawn from cities around the world.

Equity

Equity, as it relates to data, is a fluid concept that has the ability to deliver powerful outcomes to strengthen broader socioeconomic equity around the world. For the sake of simplicity, we will use the definition provided by the San José Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation, which describes data equity as “using the City's data in ways that drive equitable outcomes for our constituents”.⁴ Data can be used to shed light on various equity measures, including ethnic and demographic data, location-specific circumstances, and calculating the digital divide.⁵ These insights are bolstered by open data efforts that bring together publicly available data (e.g. census data) with privately held data (e.g. mobile phone data) to build a more comprehensive understanding of different measures of equity and a more accurate reflection of lived conditions. 

San Antonio’s Equity Atlas and New York City’s Equitable Development Data Explorer are examples of projects that provide information on spatial inequality down to the neighborhood level by overlaying demographic indicators and infrastructure distribution on city maps.^{6 7} This level of detail is critical to addressing the institutional challenges that inequity poses for both local and regional governments. Other cities in the United States, such as Portland, Austin, Tacoma, and Louisville, have followed the example set by San Antonio and New York City by developing their own Equity Atlases.

Open data practices can also drive broader data equity outcomes.⁸ For instance, open data can help address issues around bias, transparency, accountability, and accessibility, making equity measures more equitable themselves. In San José, the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation focuses its attention on administrative data to mitigate the risk of bias present in survey data.⁹ This, combined with city system data, can provide robust and bias-free insights and also improve data accessibility by emphasizing the importance of public domain data. Cities like Detroit are further using open data to improve transparency and accountability by disseminating public information for social good.¹⁰ This includes using information on public projects to address inequality, as well as data on marginalized communities to promote development efforts.

Climate Change

Open data also plays a key role in addressing the global impact of climate change. As noted in some GovLab reports, effective data usage can help improve situational awareness; understand cause and effect; strengthen our predictive capabilities; and provide robust impact assessments.¹¹ These in turn offer insights to develop the timely, evidence-based policies and interventions we need to face this challenge. 

While international organizations like the International Open Data Charter and the World Resources Institute offer guidelines on how to use and govern open data to tackle climate change, city governments are, in many cases, leading the adoption of open data and associated technologies to tackle climate change.^{12 13 14} New York City’s Environment & Health Data Portal, for instance, provides data on over 200 environmental health indicators.¹⁵ Along with raw data, the portal also provides extensive analyses of these indicators covering a range of issues, from the impact of COVID-19 on the environment to the effect of heat waves on the city’s infrastructure. In an effort to reach a wider, more diverse audience, the portal also offers neighborhood specific reports and data stories, including reports on asthma and the environment in New York City’s Washington Heights for example. Another example of this is how data is being used to understand the history in the city of redlining - the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on residents’ race and depriving them of resources and opportunities.¹⁶ 

Chicago’s Array of Things (AoT) is another example of a sophisticated data portal that provides information on almost every aspect of urban living.¹⁷ Using a system made up of programmable sensors with computing capability, the city is able to capture real-time data on a vast range of urban environmental factors, from traffic patterns to air quality to noise levels. Insights from this data can be used to inform urban flood responses, improve pedestrian safety, and strengthen city service delivery. All of the data collected is open and accessible to the public, empowering actors across the urban ecosystem to analyze urban environments, develop new policy tools, and improve urban infrastructure. 

Low- and middle-income countries around the world are also beginning to implement open data practices to counter the growing threat climate change poses to their ecosystems. In resource constrained environments, mobile big data (MBD) has been shown to be effective in strengthening urban climate resilience.¹⁸ For instance, insights from MBD give municipal agencies timely information on climate events and can help them identify and respond to changing climate patterns with lower-cost solutions. In another example, LIRNEasia, a telecommunications think tank, partnered with major Sri Lankan mobile network operators to use mobility data to provide insights to the Colombo city government on how to make public transport more sustainable and how to potentially redraft administrative boundaries to promote better governance.¹⁹ 

Crisis Response

One of the first uses of big data during a crisis (often referred to as “big crisis data”) was in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.²⁰ Since then, the use of data in crisis response situations has become increasingly common and more effective. In addition to natural disaster relief, data-driven solutions have been used across a number of different crisis situations, from migration crises and public violence to terror attacks and infrastructure failures. 

More recently, open data and big crisis data have been used extensively in understanding and responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Major global institutions collaborated to track and share up-to-date data on the pandemic through platforms such as the World Health Organization’s Coronavirus Dashboard or Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 Dashboard.^{21 22} Similarly, governments at the national and city level tracked and shared data with their citizens concerning the state of COVID-19 in their communities. These platforms provided invaluable information to urban policymakers, helping them respond to fast changing circumstances with heightened situational awareness. 

As we emerge from the pandemic, these dashboards are serving as key resources in understanding how open data can be collected and leveraged effectively to respond to crises in real time. They are also informing resilience-building projects in the health sector and beyond. For example, the Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) aims to provide policymakers and other disaster management actors in both the public and private sector with the data and knowledge they need to make effective policy decisions; it allows sharing, collecting, and using data from public, private, and academic actors on urban and rural ecosystems.²³ OpenDRI is also building tools to strengthen our understanding of different disaster risks and how to mitigate and recover from them. Such efforts will eventually create sustainable disaster relief capacity for communities around the world. 

Circular Economy 

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines a circular economy as “a systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution.”²⁴ Sustainability is at the center of such resilient systems, which benefit both businesses and the environment. 

Open data plays a key role in promoting the effective adoption of circular economies.²⁵ Policymakers and other actors engaged in building circular economies are empowered through insights gained from open data to make better decisions and use resources more efficiently.²⁶ This is especially true in food systems, where logistical limitations and challenges across the production process can benefit from data-driven insights. Open data also plays a key role in measuring and analyzing different environmental factors to help limit and mitigate the effects of pollution.

Given the number and scale of changes required to build and sustain circular economies, cities have become incubators for the development of circular economic systems where the effective use of open data and economic practices are able to reinforce each other. For example, Helsinki’s pioneering work in mobility as a service (MaaS), coupled with a stable supply of open data and applications through the Helsinki Region Infoshare, is helping the city build a smart public transport ecosystem whose design closely aligns with circular economic principles.²⁷ 

Similarly, urban mining assessments depend on open data to help identify materials available for reuse and to ensure their efficient reuse. In the Netherlands, the BAG (Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen) database contains information on each building in the country, including details on the age of the building, its design, and what materials were used in its construction.²⁸ This database serves as the foundation of many urban mining assessments in cities across the Netherlands, as they plan for future circular economies.²⁹ 

Emerging Trends in Open Data Infrastructure 

The above examples illustrate ways in which open data can play a key role in several aspects of urban development. Building on this discussion, we will now explore trends in the recent developments of infrastructure and standards that are strengthening the capabilities of open data in 21st century cities. In this section, we will focus on the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and “digital twins”, and then unpack the concepts of interoperability and standardization.

The Internet of Things and Digital Twins

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the global infrastructure of sensors, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data over the internet.³⁰ Today, this infrastructure consists of over 7 billion devices, a number that is expected to triple by 2025.³¹ IoT devices are an important source of real-time, reliable data on a wide variety of phenomena, including air quality, individual heart rates, traffic patterns, and morning coffee orders. These sensors and devices are important sources of data to inform urban policy measures and improve service delivery, especially with the advent of Smart Cities.^{32 33}

Cities around the world are leveraging IoT technology to collect vast amounts of data to construct “digital twins” or copies of cities and their infrastructure, including roads, buildings, transport systems, and much more.³⁴ Such twins are usually updated in real time, based on behaviors and patterns in the physical cities. Access to hyper-local real time data creates opportunities for analysis that would have previously been unimaginable. This opens up the possibility for data informed, evidence based policymaking. Such policymaking is in evidence, for example, in cities like Seoul and Madrid.^{35 36}

In Seoul, the Metropolitan Government uses its Open Data Plaza to share data with the public.³⁷ Leveraging IoT technology, the city government provides its citizens not only with real time updates on public transportation but also lists public WiFi services, non-smoking areas, services for disabled people, and more. Interestingly, the government’s goal is twofold. While the service improves public service delivery and accountability, it also aims to open up new business opportunities for the private sector by offering an open application programming interface (API) format to promote innovation.³⁸ The concept of the smart city is rapidly spreading across South Korea, leading to the creation of new platforms and, in certain cases, entirely new cities.³⁹

Digital twins often take the form of 3D virtual representations or models of physical cities. These models capture the current landscape of a city in considerable detail, often mapping public transit systems, vegetation, light and shadows, heat maps, buildings, and other points of interest. The models are dynamic, enabling city planners and policymakers to experiment with changes in the virtual world before implementing them in the real world.⁴⁰ Certain cities, such as Boston, have even made their digital twins public, encouraging citizens and private sector actors to engage with this new technology to study and understand the effects, for instance, of infrastructure developments and climate change on the city.⁴¹ 

Standardization and Interoperability

As the use of IoT devices spreads and the amount of data collected and shared by them grows exponentially, data protocols and standards will be required to improve the quality and strengthen the interoperability of data.⁴² Protocols and standards can help ensure that data is complete and in a universal format. This is especially relevant in the context of urban development, where diverse sources of data can reflect contrasting realities, posing a challenge when it comes to leveraging the data to achieve actionable insights. 

In the Netherlands, five cities have come together to establish their own standard of mobility data to enable more effective data exchanges between cities and mobility operators.⁴³ The City Data Standard-Mobility (CDS-M) will create a platform focused on sharing mobility data in alignment with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).⁴⁴ The goal of the project is to give policymakers a more robust understanding of mobility and shared public spaces, allowing them to strengthen policies related to mobility. With greater standardization and improvements in interoperability, cities will be better positioned to realize the benefits of open data for urban development. 

New Operational Models 

Alongside developments in open data infrastructure that empower cities to implement cutting-edge technologies, innovative operational models also offer fresh ways for actors to benefit from open data. The next section describes three such models: partnerships, incubators, support networks and digital sandboxes, and citizen participation.

Partnerships

Partnerships across sectors promise to bring new insights to further the public good. One model of collaboration in open data is a data collaborative, in which privately held data is made accessible and harnessed by actors from the public sector, civil society, or academia.^{45 46} Data collaboratives help to bridge gaps in data supply and demand, promoting responsible and efficient reuse. Data collaboratives are quickly becoming common worldwide, for instance to address societal challenges related to urban mobility, public health, and corruption.

In 2020, the City of New York launched its Recovery Data Partnership (RDP).⁴⁷ As part of the initiative, the city government partnered with 15 organizations from the private sector and civil society to share data in support of the city’s COVID-19 response and recovery efforts. The shared data helped policymakers better understand the fast-moving urban environment and respond to events in real time. Insights from the partnership also helped inform reopening and recovery strategies for the city as it came out of the pandemic. Longer term projects, such as the Amsterdam Data Exchange (AMDEX) and the Community Services Data Alliance (CSDA) in major cities across Australia, likewise bring together actors from across sectors in a marketplace for data, facilitating efficient data sharing and reuse by matching supply with demand.^{48 49}

Incubators, Support Networks, and Digital Sandboxes

Incubators, support networks, and digital sandboxes offer critical resources to city officials engaged in designing and implementing open data projects. They can also act as platforms for urban policymakers to exchange ideas, foster collaboration, and test interventions.

The Open Data Policy Lab’s City Incubator is one example of a program supporting cities engaged in data innovation.⁵⁰ Working with 10 public intrapreneurs representing 10 countries, the inaugural six-month course focused on providing leaders in city government with the tools and guidance they need to build and scale impactful open data infrastructure. Beyond the pedagogical element of an incubator program, participants also benefit from mentorship, access to global expert networks, and opportunities to collaborate with alumni. 

Support networks operate in a similar fashion, bringing together leaders in urban open data to promote knowledge sharing and to build new global networks of expertise. Support networks are often larger than incubator programs, and may have a geographical element to them. The newly launched Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance is one such program; it will bring officials from 100 cities across the Americas together in a network.⁵¹ Unusually, this program will include a teaching element as well as funding for cities to build data capacity. An example of a more traditional support network would be the European Union’s Sharing Cities project, which acts as a setting for cities to collaborate on smart city solutions.⁵² The aim of the project is to connect more than 100 municipalities in Europe.

Digital sandboxes enable actors to develop and test solutions before they are implemented in practice. Sandboxes usually provide actors with access to synthetic and open datasets, expert support and technological infrastructure.⁵³ In the context of urban development, digital sandboxes can be used to test new open data solutions, specific technological interventions, regulatory models and more. In London⁵⁴, for example, their digital sandbox focuses on fostering innovative sustainability initiatives for the city, while Singapore⁵⁵ recently launched a sandbox centered around the advancement of privacy enhancing technologies. 

Citizen Participation 

Alongside larger organizations and entities, individual citizens also play a key role in fostering and enabling open data ecology. Analogies can be made within the realm of scientific research, where citizen science has proven to be an effective way to promote research and foster innovation. In the case of open data, citizens can contribute to the ecosystem by acting as sources of data and by analyzing publicly accessible data to derive new insights. 

A citizen-focused framework can serve as an important source of big data for urban policymakers.⁵⁶ Projects like New York City’s Street Tree Map and Breathe London use citizen-sourced data to bolster their public data sets and acquire a more accurate representation of on-the-ground situations.^{57 58} At the same time, citizens can actively analyze data, playing the role of citizen scientists whose insights create value for the public good. 

Citizen participation in open data is also important when it comes to the governance of open data practices. As one of the many data suppliers in the ecosystem, as well as end users and beneficiaries of open data, citizens are crucial stakeholders when it comes to determining how open data should be used in their communities. The Data Assembly is an example of one initiative that brings citizens together in conversations about the use of data.⁵⁹ Over a series of public deliberations, the Data Assembly convened policymakers, advocates, and New Yorkers to yield actionable recommendations on data-driven responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and other challenges facing New York City. 

Governance and Policies

It is important to codify practices surrounding open data. Responsible data practices will follow from well-designed urban open data policies and governance frameworks. In what follows, we will look at emerging trends in governance and policies for urban open data. 

Digital charters and ethical standards of practice offer one governance model for urban open data. Although typically not legally binding, these documents offer critical guidelines for the ethical use of data and new technologies. Charters and standards are often concerned with the human impact of technology, and focus on principles of privacy, transparency, and equality. London’s 2020 Digital Charter and Barcelona’s Ethical Digital Standards are good models for this form of governance around emerging technologies.^{60 61} 

Another model can be found in the creation of open government data (ODG) projects following the adoption of legal commitments to uphold open data principles.⁶² For example, Montevideo’s Open Data Resolution (Municipal Resolution 640/10) was passed in 2010, ahead of the launch of the city’s new open data portal.⁶³ Similarly, in Buenos Aires, the city government enacted its Open Government Decree 156/2012, which outlined guidelines for data collaborations, citizen engagement, and measures of transparency. The decree acted as the foundation for the creation of Buenos Aires’ open data initiative later that same year.⁶⁴ 

Funding

Funding can sometimes pose a hurdle for urban open data projects, though public funding mechanisms are slowly growing.⁶⁵ In the United States, for instance, the Treasury encouraged cities to use funding from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to invest in building sustainable data systems to measure evidence-based interventions and their outcomes. Cities like Syracuse, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. are using ARPA funding to develop their urban open infrastructures.⁶⁶ 

An alternate route for funding is through philanthropic foundations investing in technological infrastructure and innovation. The Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance, for instance, will invest in the urban data capacities of 100 cities across North, Central, and South America over a 12-month period.⁶⁷ Unfortunately, such programs are relatively scarce, and considerable funding gaps stunt the potential of open urban data around the world. 

Conclusion

There is much work to be done in the coming years to create a citizen-centric, sustainable, and efficient open data ecosystem for cities. Each of the sections above highlights areas for future potential development, such as sustainable funding and improved cross-city data sharing. Moving forward, it will also be important to take a more global and comprehensive perspective, exploring and understanding developments outside the so-called developed world. A broader geographic and sectoral outlook will open up opportunities for knowledge sharing and greater innovation in the long term.